SPRING THEATER/VISIONS OF AMERICA; A Death in Laramie, Reimagined as Drama

IN the frigid early-morning hours of Oct. 7, 1998, a bicyclist found the beaten and bloodied body of a 21-year-old college student tied to a buck-rail fence in a remote field outside Laramie, Wyo. Matthew Shepard was not dead yet, but within five days he would be. Two local roofers about the same age as the victim were arrested and charged with a murder they eventually confessed to committing.

Learning that Mr. Shepard was gay, they had lured him out of a downtown bar, robbed him of $20, then beat him into unconsciousness with the butt end of a handgun. They left him to die on the prairie because they did not know what else to do with him. To avoid the death penalty, each pleaded guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison with no chance for parole.

As one more in a growing list of shocking murders in recent years, along with those of Nicole Brown Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey and James Byrd Jr., the killing of Mr. Shepard brought with it the usual accompaniment of intense media coverage and soul-searching questions about how such a tragedy could have occurred. The murder had the added dimension of martyrdom: his sexual orientation and violent manner of death fused, symbolizing for gay men and lesbians how close they still live to forces of hate, fear and misunderstanding.

As a site for the murder, Laramie seemed no more unlikely than anywhere else, a quiet, nondescript working-class town of 27,000 people, most of whom are white, heterosexual and unaccustomed to national attention, particularly if it suggests that just for sharing the same ZIP code as the killers, they might also be perceived as homophobic.

Yet through the arrests, confessions and sentencings, it was plainly evident how such a horrifying event affected those closest to it -- Mr. Shepard's family, the killers' families, the killers themselves. It was never quite so clear how Laramie fared. Could the town ever return to its docile anonymity, or would it forever carry a murderous stigma as a place of intolerance, where a gay man was killed for being gay? Who could really know? As Laramie tried to move on, most of the cameras left.

But a curious group of interrogators stayed behind, and out of what they learned over a year of visits, during which they tape-recorded interviews with 200 Laramie residents, Moises Kaufman has crafted his latest play. The artistic director of the Tectonic Theater Project in New York, Mr. Kaufman has created ''The Laramie Project,'' an attempt to unpeel the layers of a town to understand how ordinary people might be affected by extraordinary events.

The play, a production of the Denver Center Theater Company in association with Tectonic, was scheduled to open last night at the Ricketson Theater in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Denver is the closest big city to Laramie. The play is expected to run through April 1. Mr. Kaufman then hopes to move it to New York.

''When Matthew was beaten, it was a watershed moment,'' Mr. Kaufman said in a recent interview as he and his company transcribed and evaluated hundreds of hours of audio tapes.

''At these certain watershed moments,'' he went on, ''ideas float around in our culture, and an event like this becomes a lightning rod as the ideas come together, parallel subjects like gay issues, community issues, violence, class.

''As we do with most of our projects, we asked ourselves, can the theater play a part in the national dialogue of current events? Media does that differently with radio, television and newspapers. We want to know if there is room for the theater to add to that.''

Mr. Kaufman's last play, ''Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,'' attempted to answer similar questions about similar issues in its own context, Victorian England, and did so with rousing success. Though there was no actual murder, Wilde's position and reputation (and ultimately his life) were casualties once he was found guilty of being a homosexual and sentenced to jail. Drawn from actual court documents, testimony and handwritten journals -- the only sources of the words uttered onstage -- the play opened to glowing reviews in 1997 and ran for more than 600 performances in New York before moving on to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto and London. It continues in many other cities here and abroad.

In ''The Laramie Project,'' the presentation is more personal, even though the play focuses less directly on the murder than on its impact on the town. The story unfolds onstage through the words of those interviewed by Mr. Kaufman's actors and writers, and also through the actors' responses as they recreate their interview sessions, sometimes playing both interviewer and interviewee, marking the difference with costume and accent changes.

Mr. Kaufman acknowledged a certain amount of artistic license, inasmuch as any creative endeavor involves some content selection and editing. But the audience is never duped. The play opens with a narrator conveying the important distinction that it is based on what the actors heard from their sources, not on what the sources said.

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In some ways, the process resembles the work of Anna Deavere Smith, the author and performer who created two acclaimed plays after conducting hundreds of taped interviews -- to reflect ethnic strife in New York City in ''Fires in the Mirror'' and civil disturbances in California in ''Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.'' Her current work, ''House Arrest,'' examines the role of the presidency through interviews and historical documents.

But there are important differences between her work and his, Mr. Kaufman said. While Ms. Smith alone decided how many of those interviewed would be given life onstage, the Tectonic project involved 11 actors and writers as interviewers, a collaboration that led to intense arguments and emotional pleas by company members, campaigning to have their subjects included in the final script. By the end, only about 60 made the cut, with Mr. Kaufman and his head writer, Leigh Fondakowski, choosing.

It was also unusual -- probably unique, Mr. Kaufman said -- that a theater company would spend so much time in one place researching, a commitment that made the actors themselves virtual residents of Laramie and, as a result, part of the story. Unlike hit-and-run television and many print reporters, they had the time to win trust and, in the end, become part of the story they tell.

'' 'The Laramie Project' actually explores the effect our presence had on the town and that the town had on us,'' Mr. Kaufman said. ''It underlines the importance of the observer and constantly reminds the audience that what they are hearing and seeing is an aesthetic experience created by a group of people who are trying to tell a story and paint a portrait of what we saw and heard.''

In other words, the play is not so much a documentary as theatrical journalism, an attempt to tell a true story in a way that would be more difficult in another medium.

For Mr. Kaufman, the shocking events in Laramie had a natural resonance, given his own crosscurrents as a playwright, director and man. Mr. Kaufman, 36, whose father is a Holocaust survivor from Romania, grew up Jewish and gay in a largely Roman Catholic country, Venezuela, where he attended an Orthodox Jewish school in which almost everyone else was studying business. Arriving in the United States in 1987 to study theater, he instantly became a ''Latino.''

THOSE personal anomalies, he said, fueled an initial fascination with what happened in Laramie, and that fascination grew as he and his actors gathered material from a wide assortment of townspeople. Some of these were directly involved in the case, like prosecutors, investigators, the bartender who served Mr. Shepard the night he was assaulted and the bicyclist; others were not, including friends and relatives of Mr. Shepard and friends and relatives of his killers, and some had no connection.

The actors also interviewed Mr. Shepard's parents, Judy and Dennis, for whom the case became a crusade for laws making a victim's sexual orientation a reason for designating a crime as a hate crime. But the Shepards are not represented in the play. Nor are the killers, Aaron J. McKinney and Russell A. Henderson, whom the actors did not seek to interview.

When they first arrived in Laramie, Mr. Kaufman and his inquisitive band had no idea what their efforts might produce, he said. Some were initially shy about seeking interviews. Some were uncomfortable with the tape recorders. Most had never conducted an interview of any kind. And some had rough early encounters: Mr. Kaufman said one of the actors told him that he approached a man ''who I thought was going to kick me in the stomach.''

But as his questioners fanned out, working in teams of two, themes began emerging over their six two-week visits to the town. ''We were hearing these incredible voices, incredible stories,'' said Ms. Fondakowski, a member of the Tectonic group since 1995. ''We found that people had felt so betrayed in that their town had been misrepresented as a Podunk, hillbilly, redneck kind of place. With us, they saw they had another opportunity to tell a version of their story.''

For Mr. Kaufman and all his collaborators -- including Donovan Marley, the artistic director of the Denver Center Theater Company -- the final script uses Laramie's story to tell a much larger one: that America, for all its fortunes and power, still cannot escape the basic human conflicts, and tragedies, arising out of differences learned through fear and ignorance.

''This is about what happens to a town when it is forced to really look at all the things people really believed in all their lives,'' Mr. Kaufman said. ''A lot of the philosophy we heard from people was that Laramie was a live-and-let-live place. But I don't know. I really don't know what the truth is in that statement.''

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A version of this article appears in print on February 27, 2000, on Page 2002010 of the National edition with the headline: SPRING THEATER/VISIONS OF AMERICA; A Death in Laramie, Reimagined as Drama. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe